


Whose Woods These Are

by maracolleenbanks



Category: Dreamwalkers Universe
Genre: Gen, The Garden (Dreamwalkers)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 03:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15501684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maracolleenbanks/pseuds/maracolleenbanks





	Whose Woods These Are

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dreamwalkers Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/404361) by Siren Tycho and Mara Colleen Banks. 



There are a few weeks in August when the sun shines in Portland, and the air stops moving, and a wet heat festers in the wide river valleys. Then the city folk rent cars and follow the Sunset Highway to the Oregon Coast looking for cold rain and fog and a few minutes to cool off in the frigid waters that flow down from Alaska.

Locals know not to bother driving out the Sunset Highway on weekend mornings in the summer. Everyone in Portland, it seems, decides to head for the coast at the same moment, and traffic is so bad, drivers on the Sunset Highway enter another world. They leave for what should be an hour drive and, by the time they are done waiting in line and funnel out into Cannon Beach, they find the day gone, disappearing in the gray mist over the ocean where the sunset should be.

I jokingly called it “fairy time” when I lived there because I, like just about everyone else in Portland, treated the land between Portland and Cannon Beach as a drive-over zone. Hypnotized, we drove from the city to the coast without stopping, our cars insulators against the knowledge of where we actually were.

In retrospect, I should have known better, even before that fateful day when I drove out to the coast and never came home. My family has lived in Oregon for generations, and my grampy always said the Sunset Highway got its name because of the woods. In the old days, he said, the evergreen trees along that road were packed together so tight you could barely see the sky, even above the road. Once you started out west to the shore from the city, you had to get to the very end before you had the slightest hope of seeing the sunset.

I’m too young to remember those days. The Sunset Highway I knew is open, lined with the corpses of gas stations and restaurants that periodically spring up along the road like mushrooms, attempting to feed on tourist traffic, and die just as soon as the land is cleared and the buildings are put up. Beyond that narrow strip of decay, the land all around belongs to the timber-men, who punch holes in the woods in mile-wide squares, creating vistas with big grey skies and fog threading through black branches. It's beautiful, if you keep your eyes fixed on the horizon and avoid looking at the ground right in front of you littered with piles of broken branches and the jagged teeth of stumps.

When Neal and I drove out the Sunset Highway on an unseasonably warm day last October, we hadn't been surfing all summer and guessed that if we didn't get out on the water now, we'd be unlikely to brave the frigid water again before the calendar turned. That day, the road was empty of logging trucks and seashore day trippers. Though I own my car, I hadn’t had a reason to drive it in months, and all that time idle had not been kind. On our way back in the evening, just as we crested the highest point of the mountains that divide Portland from the coast and started to go down hill, the lights went out in the car, and we barely managed to coast into a turn-off.

Our phones had no reception that far from the city, so Neal popped the hood and leaned on the car, ready to jump and wave down anyone who might be able to help us get back home. Listening for traffic, I turned away and looked out over the cliff that marked the edge of the turn-off, trying to catch a glimpse of the “scenic vista” that had been advertised on the road. The sun was nowhere to be seen, but the moon was full and the whole world was tinted blue. The icy peak of Mount Saint Helens seemed to levitate over the land. My eyes had grown so accustomed to looking through headlights, our engine stopped clicking before I could see the pine trees like fur on the foothills of the mountain. Blue sky turned grey, turned black, a rare clear night in this part of the world, bright in the light of the moon. All was quiet except for the forest's slow exhale through the evergreen trees and rodents rustling the ferns.

I told myself they were rodents, anyway. There were bears and cougars in those woods. My grampy grew up in the country and still carries bear spray everywhere, just in case he falls off the couch and into a pair of angry paws, but I knew nothing of their habits. If I were a predator, I reassured myself, I would know my territory, and wouldn't dare the road, even if there was no traffic. It made sense but failed to convince the clenching ball of wrongness growing in my gut, which I immediately chalked up to being out of my element. From the Sunset Highway to Mount Saint Helens, there was no sign of human activity anywhere: no lights, no smoke, not even a camp fire. That was a long way, a hundred miles or more. From where I stood, the mountain was so small, I could block my view of it with my hand. How often might a bear encounter humans in these woods? What would a cougar make of these two strange, two-legged deer waiting in the clearing?

"There are more trees out there than stars, I think," I said to Neal. He didn’t answer. “Neal?”

I looked for him and almost panicked until I walked around the car and found him crouching by the front tire.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Again he didn’t answer. I took out my phone and turned it on, so I could see him more clearly in the light of the screen. He blinked against the sudden light, and shrank back.

Neal's fear surprised me. He was a Pagan—though, he called it “Earth Based Spirituality” to differentiate himself from aesthetic Pagans who meet in hotels, read poetry in ritual, pour out beers for gods who speak to their followers through “god phones” in English, and don't look at you funny for worshipping inside. Neal’s gods were wordless spirits. He communed with them where he met them. Outside. Green Man and power animals and the local spirits of trees and mountains and streams. He was dedicated. He spent most weekends in the woods on the other side of Portland eating off the land and communing with nature through whistled songs and drums. He’d spent as much time in the woods at night as I’d spent in bars downtown throwing back tater tots and IPAs. Being stranded in the woods should have felt like Neal’s second home. It wasn’t like him to be scared.

I crouched down next to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Why don’t you shut up?” he hissed.

“What is it?” I whispered again. “What’s wrong?”

“The woods,” he whispered back. “The woods are angry.”

There is nothing better for courage than thinking someone else's fear is ridiculous. I followed Neal's eyes to where he was looking across the road. It was dark, sure, but there was nothing out there that I could see. Rodents. It was probably rodents, after all, but I didn't say that aloud.

“Who are the woods angry at?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

He glanced at me just long enough to fix me a good scowl.

“Everyone,” he said. “People.”

“Why are the woods angry at people?”

“Look around,” he said. “The trees are all gone on that side of the road.”

“They are?” I asked and peered into the gloom.

We had stopped in one of the few places the logging companies hadn’t touched. The evergreens came almost up to the road. My cell phone light must have blinded him, I decided.

“I’m not sure about that, Neal,” I said.

“That’s easy enough for you to say,” he snapped. “Trees don’t scream when they’re injured. How would you like to get your arm chopped off? No. The woods like this aren’t like the ones back East. They’re young. Pissed off. They haven’t seen their mountains ground to gravel by ice ages. They won’t wait out four centuries of exploitation until its safe to call back the moose and bears like they did in Massachusetts.” 

I knew nothing about the woods in Massachusetts, but all of Neal’s people were from there. He'd left ten years ago to go to college, the fulfillment of a vow he made when he was nine. He made that vow the year his parents lost a key buyer for their apple cider, and Neal spent all that summer watching from the top of the hill as the apple trees were wrapped with chains and torn up by the roots to make way for a dozen houses. He swore that as soon as he was free to go, he would leave New England and never return.

When the time came, he came west to go to Reed. That's when I met him, the quiet kid who could never quite believe a wet suit was necessary in water at our latitude and never went home for holidays. Eventually, we got to be good enough friends that he told me his reasons for never going home. Not once while he was telling me did he raise his voice, but I could see anger smoldering in his eyes. When I met his parents at graduation, I expected them to be cooly supportive or, at least, aware of his plan to stay away. Instead, his mother held his plane ticket to Boston in her hand all the way through the graduation ceremony. Later, when he and I were alone and packing up the apartment we shared, he said nothing about his parents' plans. He said nothing at all, just tore the plane ticket in half. In the ten years since, he made good on his word and never went home, but we scarcely had a conversation without him referencing New England in some way. I was pretty sure in the ways that mattered he'd never really left.

Then there was the matter of trees. I’d learned a long time ago that when Neal got a certain tone in his voice, it was best to leave rational arguments alone and play along.

“The land will be able to tell the difference between us and logging companies, right?” I asked. “We didn’t cut down any trees.”

“No” he said. “Maybe. It depends.”

“On what?”

“If the forest remembers me.”

"You mean the Green Man?" I asked. “I thought you liked the Green Man.”

The Green Man was one of the only spirits Neal worked with that I knew by name. I knew him as a face peering happily out through green leaves. Neal had pictures and sculptures of him all over the house. He was one of the bigs, it seemed. I didn’t really know. Neal said was that he was the "most universal" spirit he bothered with. The way Neal talked about him, it sounded like he was a spirit who was somehow everywhere in nature and in specific trees at the same time. Neal had tried a few times over the course of our friendship to point the Green Man out to me, but I never saw anything but especially large trees.

“Of course, I like the Green Man," he said. "I don't mean the Green Man. I mean the woods. This place. The whole forest is one spirit. The last time I was in these woods, I could tell the place wasn’t happy, so I thought I’d go in and drum a little, you know, try to cheer the locals up. I met the spirit of the forest in a circle, and he was pissed. It was obvious he thought I was with the loggers. When I finally convinced him I wasn't, we wanted me to talk to one of the volcanos for him, and I promised I would.”

“Why did he want you to talk to a volcano?” I asked.

“He wants an eruption,” Neal said. "He thinks a good eruption would scare off the loggers."

“Why couldn’t he talk to a volcano himself?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Neal said. “I guess, he can’t reach to speak to the mountains from here. It’s too far.”

“So, did you?” I asked.

“I did,” he said. "I talked to Malifluah."

Malifluah was the real name—or as close as he could pronounce, Neal said—of the spirit of Mount Tabor, Portland’s resident volcano.

"And?"

“She said, ‘No.’”

“That’s the forest spirit's problem, then, isn’t it?” I asked. "You did what you said you would do."

“Maybe,” he said. “No. Probably not really. The other volcanos might have listened to me. Everyone knows Malifluah is a softie. He probably thinks I should have talked to someone else.”

“And what if he does?” I asked. "He can't do anything to you, right?"

“Damn it, Todd, I don’t know!” Neal said. The heat of his anger startled me, and I stepped back. Seeing my reaction, he looked sheepish, apologized and added, “No one knows. I’ve never heard of what a forest spirit does when they get angry.”

He looked away across the road at the woods and stared for a long time. I stared with him. There was no movement in the bushes now and not a breath of wind. The only sound came from my own feet crunching on gravel as I nervously bounced on my heels, wondering what Neal was going to do.

Finally, he stood up, fists clenched at his sides. Then he bellowed, "Woods! We're angry for you, woods!"

His words ricocheted off the trees and grew louder in their echoing.

"Woods! We're angry for you, woods!"

Neal seemed to grow taller. He raised his arms. His long shadow cast in moonlight reached across the road and up the evergreen trunks, grew branches and stems and leaves.

Then there was movement in the woods, and it definitely wasn’t any kind of rodent. Legs like tree trunks stepped out of the woods carrying the body of a man twice as tall as me. His face towered high above my head, buried in leaves, except for two kind eyes.

He stopped and seemed to consider us. I thought I knew nothing about the Green Man, but all those years living with Neal, seeing his face everywhere around the house, had done something to me. Seeing him for the first time was like meeting an old friend. The recognition didn’t seem to be mutual, though. He looked at me only for a moment before turning his attention to Neal.

The Green Man bent down and put his hand on Neal’s shoulder. Something wordless passed between them, and the Green Man walked on. The last time I saw him, he was walking down the cliff on the far side of the turn-off as easily as if it had been a flight of stairs.

Then Neal elbowed me and held out his hand to show me. It was full of apple seeds.

“He said to take good care of them,” Neal said, his voice tight with repressed emotion. “I think he must have seen what happened to my family’s trees.”

“You don’t think those seeds are from those trees?” I asked. “Do you?”

“They might be,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew what was going to happen and carried their spirits away just before they died. They say he does that, you know. When a tree loses its body, he carries the spirit of the tree along until he can find it a new home.”

He took a deep breath to steady his voice, “Kind of like us. We’re not in Oregon anymore, Todd.”

I’d been through a lot of strange ideas with Neal before, but this was too much.

“Where else would we be?” I asked. “There’s a river on one side of the road and a canyon on the other. It’s not like we’re going to accidentally drift off into California or Washington.”

He gave me a patronizing smile. “I think we’ve made a much bigger leap than that.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I said.

“You can come out now,” he called.

Out of the woods, where the Green Man had been, stepped a creature who could only be described as Bigfoot.

“This doesn’t mean we’re not in Oregon,” I said. “I’m especially surprised that’s supposed be proof we’re not in Oregon for you.”

He scoffed. “Everyone knows Bigfoot doesn’t actually exist, at least, not on Earth.”

“If we’re not on Earth, where are we?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Neal said. “All of you. It’s safe to come out now!”

Two more creatures emerged. One looked like a Leprechaun, the kind who might be a more likely find on a box of breakfast cereal than anywhere in Ireland. The second was either a water maiden or a girl who’d fallen in the river. Her long black hair and baggy robes streamed so much water onto the road a small stream was starting to form and flow down hill.

“We have to be in Oregon,” I said. “Mount Saint Helens is right over—”

I whirled around to point at it, and I saw under the light of the full moon: the mountain was gone.

“Neal,” I demanded. “Where the hell are we? And why do they speak English?”

“I don’t think they do,” Neal said. “Communicating, ‘I see you. You can come out now,’ doesn’t really require actual language, does it? It’s all about tone of voice.”

I wasn’t in a philosophical mood.

“You’d better tone-of-voice us out of this,” I mumbled.

“Why would I want to?” he asked.

“Because I’m covered with salt and sand and need a shower?” I said.

“There’s a river right down the hill,” he said.

Watching him was like watching a movie about the wizened expert filled with awe upon meeting the exotic new being. He walked toward the leprechaun with his hand out. If I was the leprechaun, I wouldn’t have known if I was expected to shake it or sniff it.

“You should know,” the leprechaun said, looking scornfully at Neal’s hand. “My incubator was from New Jersey.”

“You’ve understood every word we’ve said,” I gasped.

Neal pulled his hand back in surprise.

“There are subtle regional variations between New Jersey and—I believe you indicated that you are from the Pacific Northwest—but I get by,” the leprechaun said. “I would take it, from your surprise at being here, that you had a relatively uneventful trip through Limbo, but you seem to be missing at least one succubus.”

“Everyone knows succubi are a myth,” Neal said.

“Like leprechauns,” the leprechaun said and then, without missing a beat, said something to Bigfoot and the water maiden in a language that sounded a little bit like the sounds you’d get out of a nail file under torture before speaking to us in English again. “I’ve heard of people who have made it to Pandemonium without a succubus escort, but it’s very rare. As far as my friends and I know, everyone who has ever attempted it successfully knew they were going to Pandemonium, but you don’t seem to know where you are. Is that correct?”

“It is,” I said before Neal could answer. “We have no idea where we are, and we would appreciate any help you can give getting us home.”

Normally, Neal put himself forward as the extroverted one in these situations, but, after the hand-shaking greeting incident, I decided that I was unlikely be a worse an ambassador than he was.

“You want to go home,” the leprechaun said, “to a lost planet.”

“We’ve lost our planet,” I said, “but I’m sure we can find it again.”

“Not my kink, as my incubator says,” said the leprechaun, “but I can at least offer you a shower and a cup of tea.”

The leprechaun narrowed his eyes subtly at Neal, “This is the Garden, but we do have showers.”

Neal and I hesitated. I, at least, had read enough children’s books to be suspicious of mythological creatures offering tea.

The leprechaun sighed. “I think I understand how uncivilized a place Earth was, and then—It is quite impossible for any of us to harm you. It is part of the dreaming of this place. If you would like to test what I say, I advise you to try to take an axe to one of those trees over there.”

“We’ll take your word for it,” Neal said with a smile.

Anyone who respected trees was alright with Neal, but I was still dubious. I’d never heard anyone from New Jersey talk the way this leprechaun did. Still, I thought, they seemed to be safer than bears. The water maiden was the creepiest of the three of them, and she mostly stood there looking emo. She didn’t seem to have any interest in soaking me to death.

We followed the leprechaun across the road. Under the trees, it was so dark, I immediately tripped over a root. The leprechaun pulled a coin out of his pocket in response and whispered at it until it glowed. Then he pulled some spiderweb off of a nearby tree branch and spun it into a lacy lantern into which he deposited the coin.

By the light of the lantern, I could see that I had scraped my knee as I fell. The water maiden knelt in front of me, close enough for me to tell that she smelled like way a clean cave might smell behind a waterfall. She kissed the tips of her fingers and gestured toward my knee, asking without words if she could touch me.I nodded, and she touched my bloody knee with her fingertips. The wound had closed before she even pulled her hand away. Her cure had even removed the grit it’d picked up from the forest floor. It was just as well she didn’t speak English because I was speechless. She seemed to pick up the gratitude in my surprise, though, because she flashed me a shy smile.

Bigfoot offered me a hand and helped me to my feet. I was cautious about my knee at first, but it was obvious in a step or two that the water maiden really had cured it completely.

The leprechaun was the fastest walker among us, and I jogged to catch up with him. The trail we followed was too narrow for me to walk beside him, so I stayed a step or two behind, trying not to loom.

“You said this place is a garden?” I asked.

“This is _the_ Garden,” the leprechaun answered.

“I don’t know what life was like for you in New Jersey, but I’m pretty sure there’s more than one,” I said.

“My apologies,” he said. “I didn’t mean to imply exclusivity. Your language, if you don’t mind me saying so, seems custom designed to offend native speakers. No, the Garden is one of the four planes of Pandemonium. My incubator says that “Garden” and “Pandemonium” are the best words in your language for the place we live, but I’m the erudite one in our relationship. You wouldn’t know it from the way I’m probably treading all over your language, but I have quite a talent with Infernal. Though, my talent with the language is nothing to our Bigfoot, however.”

“Bigfoot?” I asked.

“Don’t mistake your stereotypes and his ignorance of your language for the totality of his being,” the leprechaun said. “In Infernal, he is a poet.”

He said something in Infernal then. I guessed it must have been relaying the compliment to Bigfoot because Bigfoot blushed. 

“What does he write?” I asked. “Hunting epics?”

“You might call them that, I suppose,” the leprechaun said. “He is a succubus, after all, but I prefer to think of his poems as romantic poetry. We do care about our prey, even if your mythologers on Earth don’t think so.”

“Bigfoot is a succubus?” I asked.

“We’re all succubi,” the leprechaun said. “We are all, all three of us, someone’s fantasy. Humans are very diverse, and your fantasies are even more so, if you don’t mind hearing that from an outsider.”

We rounded a bend in the woods and found ourselves in front of a red and white speckled mushroom the size of a house. The leprechaun lead us around a flagstone path to the other side, and we saw that it _was_ a house. We followed the leprechaun through a low door, just tall enough for Bigfoot, Neal, and I to enter without bumping our heads.

The inside of the mushroom was palatial yet rustic, as if someone had put a tree house, a log cabin, and Versailles into a blender. The fins of the mushroom had been converted into bookshelves that held the books slotted in upside down. Each one was just within reach of a white and gold staircase that curled up into the mushroom’s cap.

The leprechaun put one foot on the bottom step and yelled up the stairs, “Delilah, we have guests!”

He didn’t wait for an answer before he shepherded us into a room under the staircase with a big window overlooking a flower garden. He gestured for us to sit on benches around a mushroom table that looked like the house in miniature. After getting the water maiden a couple of buckets to catch the water that flowed out from the ends of her hair, he mopped up the puddles she’d already made and put a heavy iron kettle over the fire in the fireplace to boil.

I glanced at Neal to see how he was taking all of this. He looked serene, as if he had been expecting to end up in Wonderland any day now, and this was his lucky day.

“You mentioned earlier,” I said to the leprechaun, “that people from Earth usually need a succubus to get to Pandemonium. Why is that?”

“No one is entirely sure what it is about us,” the leprechaun said, “but succubi are particularly adept at getting in and out of Limbo.”

“You’ve mentioned Limbo a couple of times,” Neal said. “What is it?”

“You should know,” the leprechaun said. “You drove through it, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I didn’t notice if we did, anyway.”

“Didn’t drive into any fog banks?” the leprechaun asked.

“Well, there was one,” Neal said. “It was at the beginning of our trip home. There’s usually a fog bank as you get far enough away from the beach for the temperature to change.”

“I don’t know about beaches and temperatures,” the leprechaun said, “but you drove into a fog bank and ended up in Pandemonium. That tells me you’ve been through Limbo. It’s a mystery to me how you could do that and not notice.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Limbo is like night dreams, a reflection of your unconscious assumptions about a place. Usually, people who travel through Limbo see things that disturb them.”

“There’s nothing to see along that road,” I said. “There’s nothing there but trees.”

“That’s not true,” Neal said. “There’s a store along the way that always seemed weird to me. They have fifty zillion signs out front advertising jerky made of all kinds of exotic animals in huge red letters.”

“Is that the sort of thing you’re talking about?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” the leprechaun said. “I’m not aware of this jerky you speak of. Does it have cultural connotations?”

“A few,” I said.

Neal and I exchanged looks. I was relieved when the leprechaun didn’t ask any more questions.

“If that’s true,” Neal said, “we’ve driven through Limbo a lot. Why do you think we ended up here this time?”

“I have no idea,” the leprechaun said. “I’ve only been through Limbo once with my Delilah, and I have no desire to go back. Speaking of.”

The leprechaun stuck his head out the door and yelled, “Delilah!”

“I’m almost ready!” a voice yelled down the stairs.

“If they’re going to primp that much, we should just move to Isla Virgo,” the leprechaun grumbled.

“Is Delilah your incubator?” I asked.

The leprechaun nodded and glanced at the kettle which was erupting steam. He grabbed a towel and pulled it off the fire and onto a metal stand that looked a bit like a spider, and took delicate pink and white teacups and saucers out of a cabinet and placed them on a tea tray.

“Most of this is their dreaming,” he said. “Except the dragonfly wings. Though, I suppose you could say those were their dreaming, too. They just used my nectar to pull it off.”

This must have been some kind of accomplishment because he looked proud when he said it. Then Delilah flew into the room and rolled playfully in the air, like Peter Pan with fairy wings, before taking a seat on the bench next to Bigfoot. For all the leprechaun’s grumbling, it was obvious from the moment they saw each other that Delilah and the leprechaun loved each other fiercely.

Delilah sniffed at me and Neal. “You’re not succubi. I don’t smell a single drop of nectar on you.”

“We’re Oregonians,” Neal said.

“I’m an Oregonian,” I said. “You’re from Massachusetts.”

Delilah brightened and then looked even more excited when the leprechaun put a plate of sugar cookies on the table. The tea tray followed, and Delilah poured a coup of tea for each of us.

“Are you from Boston?” Delilah asked. “I went to Boston once before the war to visit Harvard. I would have gone there, too, if the war hadn’t taken me, or maybe after, if my leprechaun hadn’t kidnapped me from the trenches, but I don’t mind. I’d rather live in the Garden than have gone to Harvard. Tell me you’re from Boston.”

“I’m not,” Neal said. “My parents owned an apple orchard out in the country.”

“And, of course, that’s why you’re here,” Delilah said, and then they turned to me. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said.

“Well,” Delilah said breathily. “You’ll figure it out, or the nectar will figure it out for you. You should put a drop or two in their tea, Talia,” they said to the water maiden. “Let’s see what they turn into. It’s not like you can’t spare it. That water coming out of her hair is actually nectar, if you can believe it. Isn’t that amazing?”

“I think Todd got a drop of Talia’s nectar already,” Neal said. “He tripped and cut his leg on the walk over, and Talia kissed it better.”

“That was nectar?” I asked. “That was incredible. I didn’t think it was possible to heal a cut that fast.”

“It’s not,” Delilah said. “It’s not where _you’re_ from, but, oh yes. All the best succubi in Pandemonium have nectar.”

“My incubator means all succubi have nectar,” the leprechaun said.

“They do?” Delilah asked. “Every single one? Amazing.”

“Yes, darling. It’s one of the differences between us and incubi,” the leprechaun said.

“Don’t talk to me about incubi,” Delilah said. “I didn’t go through the Somme to talk about incubi. I would much rather talk about Boston. Oh, but you’re not from Boston. Pity.”

“The Somme?” Neal asked. “You mean World War I?”

“You mean to tell me there was a second one?!” Delilah gasped.

“That means you must have left a hundred years ago,” I said. “How old are you?”

“If the Great War was a century ago, that must make me a hundred and eighteen,” Delilah said, “but I’ve stopped counting—not that I can count how long it’s been since I left Earth from Earth’s perspective. Time runs differently here, you know.”

“We do?” Neal asked.

“Of course, your succubi told you, didn’t they?” Delilah said.

“Darling, they don’t have succubi,” the leprechaun said.

“You don’t have succubi? How could you?” Delilah asked.

I braced myself for the same startled explanation-seeking that we’d gone through with the leprechaun, but Delilah didn’t seem to care.

“Tut,” Delilah said. “We’ll have to find you a pair…or more…of succubi immediately, assuming you don’t want to take the time to incubate yourself. If I had known anything about how succubi worked, I would have gone with a pre-made one instead of spending all those hours looking at fairy pictures in the trenches. Of course, then I wouldn’t have my leprechaun, and that would have been _tragic_. I wonder what your dreams will be—or if you’ll even bother. I don’t know what makes humans tasty to succubi, but you look awfully nice to me.”

“Tasty?” I asked.

I looked toward the door and figured that I would only have to knock Neal and Talia over to get to it. Neal probably wouldn’t mind. He’d probably be out the door before me, if it came to it.

“Succubi feed on sex, of course,” Delilah said. “You didn’t think I meant literal chomp-chomp eating, did you? How barbaric. They feed on sex and their nectar makes us…well…perfect!”

“Ageless?” I asked.

It would explain why Delilah claimed to be a hundred and barely looked twenty.

“If that’s your perfection,” Delilah said, “and you can eat as many cookies as you want and never get sick.”

Neal and I both took another cookie.

“So, are you still thinking about going home?” the leprechaun asked.

“No,” I said. “No, I really don’t think so.”


End file.
